Stonor understood. He answered in the same tone: “At this season it doesn’t fade out all night. The sun is such a little way below the rim there, that the light just travels around the northern horizon, and becomes the dawn in a little while.”

For a while they talked of indifferent matters.

By and by she said casually: “When you go out to Swan River, take me with you.”

He thought she was joking. “I say, that would be a lark!”

She laughed a little nervously.

He tried to keep it up, though his heart set up a furious beating at the bare idea of such a trip. “Can you bake bannock?”

“I can make good biscuits.”

“What would we do for a chaperon?”

“Nobody has chaperons nowadays.”

“You don’t know what a moral community this is!”